Sacrament
Well-known member
As much as I love my family, it's emotionally hard to see the toll worrying has on them, to a point where I can't distinguish what's 'normal' worrying and what's not. As an example, my brother lives in a city that's about 100 miles from where I live. He was just here for the holidays, and returned today. It was already dark when he left, and it's been raining the whole day. My mother didn't rest until my brother got home and called her. Same goes for my dad.
My grandmother on my dad's side is the worst when it comes to worrying. She can't hear an ambulance without thinking something happened to a loved one. If I make plans to have lunch at her place and for some reason I'm a little late, she gets very worried something bad happened. It's always the go-to scenario, catastrophizing beyond belief. Since it was all I knew as a kid, it obviously rubbed off on me. When I was a kid I couldn't let my brother go out by himself without me following, to make sure he was safe. Doesn't even make sense. I guess my rationale was that if something did happen, I was close by to either call the cops, an ambulance, my parents, or simply to alert someone close by.
Thing is, the world's not messed up to a point where he can't go out somewhere and not be safe, much less in my hometown. He was never really at risk. One time when he was out of a job for a few months and running out of available funds, he went out and I had to go to work, and so I kept calling him with the excuse that he had to come home and take care of our sister (a kid). He wouldn't pick up. I even went to our garage fearing he had done something to himself. I went to work and came back home around 7am, and had spent all night imagining getting home and seeing my parents sob uncontrollably because he had actually done something to himself. I imagined what life would be like after that, how much it would suck in so many ways.
I got home and he was asleep, he'd been with some friends and left his phone in his friend's car. Catastrophising can be a real bitch.
How's your experience with worrying, and how did you flip the switch in order to focus on what's more likely to happen (nothing special), instead of considering the worst?
My grandmother on my dad's side is the worst when it comes to worrying. She can't hear an ambulance without thinking something happened to a loved one. If I make plans to have lunch at her place and for some reason I'm a little late, she gets very worried something bad happened. It's always the go-to scenario, catastrophizing beyond belief. Since it was all I knew as a kid, it obviously rubbed off on me. When I was a kid I couldn't let my brother go out by himself without me following, to make sure he was safe. Doesn't even make sense. I guess my rationale was that if something did happen, I was close by to either call the cops, an ambulance, my parents, or simply to alert someone close by.
Thing is, the world's not messed up to a point where he can't go out somewhere and not be safe, much less in my hometown. He was never really at risk. One time when he was out of a job for a few months and running out of available funds, he went out and I had to go to work, and so I kept calling him with the excuse that he had to come home and take care of our sister (a kid). He wouldn't pick up. I even went to our garage fearing he had done something to himself. I went to work and came back home around 7am, and had spent all night imagining getting home and seeing my parents sob uncontrollably because he had actually done something to himself. I imagined what life would be like after that, how much it would suck in so many ways.
I got home and he was asleep, he'd been with some friends and left his phone in his friend's car. Catastrophising can be a real bitch.
How's your experience with worrying, and how did you flip the switch in order to focus on what's more likely to happen (nothing special), instead of considering the worst?